Defending the Christian faith and promoting its wisdom against the secular and religious challenges of our day.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Our Pain and His Promises: How to Bridge the Gap

Have you experienced that seemingly impassable divide
between your present circumstances and God’s promises of love, joy, peace,
healing and deliverance? I certainly have. For years, I was unable to experience
any of my Savior’s promises. Depression and panic attacks tore so violently at
me that going to church was a torment.

It seemed to me that everyone else was a spiritual winner
and I was the biggest looser. They were realizing God’s blessings in their
lives and I wasn’t, or so it seemed. Compounding my problems, I was convinced
that there was something horribly the matter with me.

Similarly, a friend informed me that he had been
experiencing the unceasing torment of same-sex attraction. He had become a
sex-addict and found himself unable to escape the cycle of shame and guilt followed
by praying for the Lord’s deliverance. His life was entirely removed from God’s
unreachable promises of deliverance.

Unfulfilled hope grows faint, and many seek greener pastures
elsewhere. How, then, can we grasp hold of the reality of God’s promises when
they seem so far off – so ephemeral like a desert mirage? First, we need to
realize that we are not alone:

·No temptation has seized you except what is
common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond
what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so
that you can stand up under it. (1 Cor. 10:13)

In fact, the burdens that we bare are the same ones with
which the Psalmists also struggled. In a typical lament, the Psalmist lays out
the problem. He begins by citing the promises of God in God’s own words:

·I will maintain my love to him [David] forever,
and my covenant with him will never fail… I will not violate my covenant or
alter what my lips have uttered…that his line will continue forever and his
throne endure before me like the sun; it will be established forever like the
moon, the faithful witness in the sky." (Psalm 89:28-37)

Once
the Psalmist recaps God’s glory, faithfulness and promises, he then brings his angry
indictments against God:

·But you have rejected, you have spurned, you
have been very angry with your anointed one. You have renounced the covenant
with your servant and have defiled his crown in the dust. You have broken
through all his walls and reduced his strongholds to ruins… O Lord, where is
your former great love, which in your faithfulness you swore to David? (Psalm
89:38-40)

He charged that God has failed to fulfill His promises –
that Israel
is now in ruins, seemingly contradicting God’s promises of unabated future
glory. This raises a related problem. Is there a contradiction in God’s Word?
Is it therefore untrustworthy? Are the Psalms no more than an expression of the
human struggle and not completely the
Word of God?

Indeed, we are faced with what appears to be a bold-faced
contradiction: The Psalmist cites God as saying, “I will not violate my
covenant or alter what my lips have uttered,” but the Psalmist charges, “You
have renounced the covenant!” Contradiction, right?

Not necessarily! Scripture often contains errant human
statements to make its point. Job’s three friends had stated many things that
were wrong. Besides, when God appeared to correct Job, He charged that Job had
stated many things wrong about God!

Does this mean that we can no longer trust Scripture? Well,
no! However, we first have to determine the overall purpose of the book. The Book of Job demonstrated that we all
have our breaking point, even the most righteous of men. In Job’s case, his
suffering brought his self-righteousness to the surface. He eventually repented
of his wild charges against God.

Likewise,
in the Psalms, in an inerrant manner, God brings to the surface human errant
sentiments and statements. In the case of Psalm 89, the Psalmist concluded his
indictments with a simple statement of trust: “Praise be to the Lord forever! Amen and Amen.”

This
is perplexing! How can the Psalmist conclude with praise to a God who he knows
to be unfaithful? He can’t! Instead, at the end of his diatribe, the Psalmist
reaffirmed his faith in God despite the tremendous chasm between God’s promises
and Israel’s
present disappointing reality.

However,
despite the apparent contradiction, the
Psalmist reasserts his faith in the God of Israel and reassures himself that
there is a resolution to the tension, albeit obscured by his God.

In
another Psalm, the Psalmist receives the answer to his dilemma – a divine
revelation. He too had experienced the seemingly impassable chasm. While Scripture
clearly taught the blessedness of those who followed their God, the Psalmist
perceived that it was the other way around – that the evil were receiving all
of the blessings! He temporarily concluded that he was wasting his time serving
God:

·Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure; in
vain have I washed my hands in innocence. (Psalm 73:13)

However,
after God had bridged the impassable chasm between reality and promise, by way
of revelation, everything was then changed for the Psalmist. He was enabled to
see the big picture in which God resolved everything - the puzzle fit together
and every mountain and impassable chasm became a highway into His presence:

·I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute
beast before you. Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand. You
guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory. Whom
have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh
and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion
forever. (Psalm 73:22-26)

We
are all ‘brute beasts” before God. We are all so undeserving of His mercy. Our
Lord uses the tension between our painful and humbling present reality and His
promises of glory to reveal this to us. He uses this protracted waiting period
to kindle within us a knowledge and a longing for Him alone:

·Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful
trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But
rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be
overjoyed when his glory is revealed. (1 Peter 4:12-13)

If
life is too comfortable here – if there is no tension between reality and
promise – we will not “be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.” Instead, we
would probably apply for a time extension – “Come back in a couple of months.
I’m not ready yet!”

My
friend had to persevere in faith for years, but finally he was delivered from
the torments of same-sex attraction. Sadly, many have not persevered. Perhaps
they had the false expectation that reality and promise would immediately come
together and therefore became overly discouraged.

In
the midst of my many-year struggle with depression and panic attacks, I had
forsaken any hope of deliverance. It just didn’t seem that the gulf between my
reality and His promises could ever be breached. Fortunately, I had tried
everything else out, and everything had proved an unmitigated disappointment. Therefore,
I had nowhere else to go and continued to camp out at God’s doorstep. The door
was closed but perhaps it might open. It wasn’t much of a hope, but it was my
only hope. Meanwhile, the Psalmist counsels, “wait!”

·I am still confident of this: I will see the
goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong
and take heart and wait for the Lord. (Psalm 27:13-14)

How
then do we bridge the gap? Sometimes, the only thing we can do is wait. (But
sometimes, it might also be “Repent, and follow Me!”)

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